It was the first session I’d run solo. Donovan had left three days ago, and the empty space beside me hadn’t stopped registering. I kept glancing to my left during setups, expecting the quiet commentary that wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t the same without him.
“Reeves. You’re up.”
He stepped forward without hesitation, which was the right answer to a question I hadn’t asked. I handed him Jolly’s lead.
“You’ve watched me work him for weeks. Today, you’re sending him. Same commands, same sequence. I’m the target.” I held up the sleeved arm. “Your only job is to read the dog, give the command, and control the release. Don’t overthink it.”
Reeves took the lead and looked down at Jolly. The dog was already locked in. His ears forward, muscles taut beneath the harness, eyes fixed on the sleeve like nothing else in the room existed. His tail had gone rigid, a straight line from his spine. No wagging. No play. Just the controlled vibration of a dog who knew exactly what was about to happen.
“He knows,” Reeves said.
“Hell yeah. He knew before I put the sleeve on.”
I walked to the far end of the bay. Thirty yards. Standard distance for a controlled send in an enclosed space. The concrete floor was scuffed from weeks of drills: boot marks, paw marks, the long drag lines where officers had practiced their footwork. I turned to face them.
This was the part that never quite made sense to anyone who hadn’t done it. Standing across from your own dog, making yourself a target for the animal you’d trusted with your life for the better part of a decade.
Jolly didn’t see me right now. Not really. He saw thesleeve. He saw the posture. He saw the invitation. Everything that made me Ben—his handler, his partner, the person who fed him and slept beside him and had carried him out of two IED craters—was irrelevant. He’d been trained to separate the person from the task, and he was very, very good at it.
I planted my feet and raised my arm.
“Whenever you’re ready, Reeves.”
The bay went quiet. I could hear Jolly’s breathing from thirty yards away—fast, shallow, the panting of a dog whose entire body was begging for the command. Reeves had both hands on the lead, one at his hip, one near the clip. Good hand position. He was watching Jolly’s head, reading the angle of his attention, waiting for the lock-on to settle into that absolute stillness that meant the dog was committed.
Jolly stopped panting. His weight shifted forward onto his front legs. Every fiber of him pointed at me like an arrow drawn back and held.
Reeves unclipped the lead.
“Fass.”
Jolly launched.
There’s no way to describe the speed of a trained apprehension dog at full commitment except to say that the distance disappeared. One second, he was at the far wall. The next, he was airborne, flying at me and hitting the sleeve with an impact that traveled through my shoulder, down my spine, and into the concrete under my boots.
I braced and absorbed it, letting him latch and work the sleeve the way he’d been taught: full jaw engagement, head thrashing side to side, that deep, sustained pressure that would make any suspect in the world stop running.
The sound of it was something you felt as much as heard. The heavy crunch of the sleeve material compressing under those jaws. The scrape of his nails on the floor as he dug infor leverage. A low growl that came from somewhere in his chest, not aggressive but focused.
It was the sound of a dog doing the thing he was built to do.
I held position. Let him work. Counted to five in my head, then gave the command. “Aus.”
Jolly released. Immediately. Clean. He dropped back, circled once, and sat at my feet—tail suddenly wagging, tongue out, whole body loose. The switch was instant and total, like someone had flipped a breaker. Ten seconds ago, he’d been a weapon. Now he was pressing his head against my thigh, looking up at me with soft brown eyes.
“Good boy.” I dug my fingers into the fur behind his ears. He leaned into it, content, already forgetting what he’d just done. Or, at least, not caring. For Jolly, the work and the love existed in separate rooms, and he moved between them without conflict.
Someone in the back let out a low whistle.
“That,” Briggson said, “is a hell of a dog.”
I unstrapped the sleeve and walked back to the group, shaking out my arm. The impact lingered with a deep ache in my forearm, the kind that would bruise by tomorrow. The fact that it was over my almost-healed knife wound didn’t help.
Jolly trotted beside me, tail still going, completely unbothered by the fact that he’d just tried to take down the person he loved most in the world.
Or maybe I’d moved down to second now behind William. Honestly, I couldn’t be sure anymore.
“All right.” I set the sleeve on the equipment table. “Let’s talk about what just happened. From my end, not his.”
